Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

by N.T. Wright

with the resurrection of Jesus the entire story of God and Israel, and God and the world, must be told in a new way.

The resurrection isn’t just a surprise happy ending for one person; it is instead the turning point for everything else.

Easter and Pentecost belong together. Easter commissions Jesus’s followers for a task; Pentecost gives them the necessary equipment to accomplish it.

Sin is the root cause of death; if death has been defeated, it must mean that sin has been dealt with. But if the Messiah has not been raised, we are still in a world where sin reigns supreme and undefeated so that the foundational Christian belief, that God has dealt with our sins in Christ, is based on thin air and is reduced to whistling in the dark.

What you do with your body in the present matters, he insists, because God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power.